Re the STAT tool. I have been using it for almost two year. It is a REALLY good tool- I finally have everything in one place.

For example, you can manage a huge volumes of terms, track its rankings every single day (across different search engines), pull their average search volumes AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, you can TAG each of your terms (e.g. landing page type, keywords group, but also kw difficulty- just by whatever you need etc.).

When I started working on the current client, I tagged 16k terms so now can see how the rankings improve per tag group (you can watch historical graphs of those rankings etc.) Tagging is definitely very helpful to check if any algo updated affected your site- it is definitely easier to find which pages were impacted so you can quicker dig for reasons behind it. I find it pretty amazing! If you are a control freak (what I don't find helfpul in SEO profession;), this tools definitely helps you to stay calm in times of algorithm updates:)

It's a great check list, thanks. It will definitely help me to make my on-site audit reports better organised! I think I will re-audit my own blog as I already think about a few improvements. Its really funny how we, SEO bloggers give recommendations to clients and very often still have some areas to improve on our own sites:) but noone is perfect:) its good that there are still some aspects which can give much better SERP results. but anyway... thanks for a great post!

I agree, the technical skills are crucial as well as knowing the internet culture- a good link builder must be able to understand different ways of "hiding"" links from Google (like blocking access to specific sections of a web by robots.txt etc.). I also personally think that a good link builder should be able to review his/her link building activates and checking if the pages with your links are/ have been crawled by Google as well as cached (I am talking more about links from guest post/ articles; not about links from link bait campaigns as we very often have no control over them).

From my experience, I can also say that the creativity, sales experience and ability to negotiate are very important. It’s all about finding an ideal solution/ a mutual agreement so both sides benefit from it. One of the best books I read on that matter is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. It really helped to understand how to influence and negotiate with people more effectively. It's like a little bible to me :)

This is a great question, BigJohnBen!! I have the same "problem". I currently work for a media/ publishing network. They have a main website based on a domain plus have many subdomains, which are dedicated to specific magazines. That wouldn't be a problem, however the main website (domain.com) links from main navigation to those magazines (sub1.domian.com, sub2.domain.com etc.) How does Google see that? Isn't that a spammy way of linking?

Hey SEO- Himanhu, I totally agree. It is worth to put your keywords at the begining of your description so a different snippet will not be generated. Also, very often I use highly searchable and correlated with the subject keywords within meta descriptions. For example when I wrote an article where I compare Baidu vs Google, I used word "China" in the description as poeple search for "google china" or "baidu china". In this way the meta description will stay untouched, every time when someone types a combination of those keywords. What about those titles though? Google started changing them when I used a name of my blog. The name is added at the end of each title, but again the descriptions stay the same... Have you noticed that?

It's a great article. I have a recent example how blog commenting increases my website's online visibility!

There was an interesting article on Spinn last week, so I took part in the discussion. Luckily, this comment has been chosen as a comment of the week(!) and mentioned in an article on SearchEngineLand.com (http://searchengineland.com/hot-at-sphinn-13-62287) with a link to my own website! I don't have to say that that made my day (who am I kidding:)- it made my month!:)But seriously, it really increased my motivation to take part in interesting online discussions. So, have an active approach and if you really can add value to an article by leaving a comment, just do it!

That's a great artcile and I agree with PaulMartin. If you have the personality for it, your slide deck never has to be perfect.

Rand, you wrote "I don't create or memorize a script, but I do rely on the slide deck itself to provide an order and narrative to the story I'm telling" and this is a great summary for me! We very often forget that not what we say, but how we say it that makes the difference... Research shows that in a presentation before a group of people, 55% of the imapct is determined by your body language- posture, gesstures and eye contact- 38% by your tone of voice, and only 7% by content of your presentation. Obviously the exact figures will differ in different situations, but it is worth a mention...

I have never attended any of your presentations but heard many "super-stories" about them:) so will do my best to take a part in the Linkbuilding Seminar in London.

Great article. Thank you. I am currenkly working on on-page optimisation for an international webiste in order to increase its conversion and this article is exactly what I needed! Thank you a lot! April 27, 2010